13 August 2012

I've gotta confess... by the second day of the Olympics, I was watching the CTV coverage with the sound turned off. I'm afraid the last straw for me was when one of the networks self-styled experts started prattling on about the "ten event" Decathlon (as opposed to, I suppose, the five event version?)

Funny, though... didn't see any coverage of skeet, or any other shooting sport for that matter. I guess that falls outside of the politically correct world-view of our television overlords.

Also had a bit of a problem working up much enthusiasm for their over-the-top "social engineering" segments... like shamelessly trotting out wheelchair-bound Rick Hansen to be the resident "takes a village" shaman... or the endless enumeration of the various obstacles everyone apparently had to overcome to be an Olympic athlete.

Then there was the whole manufactured ecstasy about the Islamic woman competing in her make-shift burka... which conveniently skipped over the fact that she was, one... so obviously unqualified to even be there and two... had her brother glued to her substantial person to do all of the talking for her.

It was also CTV that trotted out the fact that Canada had started up a funding initiative for Olympic athletes that funnelled an additional 60 million dollars to training athletes who had the best medal prospects.

Hey, why not just go all in... and start scooping up talented toddlers and shipping them off to Olympic factories like the Chinese? Or recruiting athletes from less well-off countries with financial inducements?

I know I won't be wasting any more of my time watching this nonsense in another four years.

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RELATED: Can't fool all of the people...

And then we get on with the event: Badminton. Trampolining. Beach volleyball. Water polo. This isn’t the body stretched to its limits — it’s the world’s largest gathering of every crank who took the croquet way too seriously at your last backyard barbecue. Would you invite back the man you found weeping in the shrubbery after he was undone at Jarts? Every four years such eccentrics are held up for our global adulation.